The Furry World from the Inside Out

Tag Archives: Fursuits

Guest post by Dain Unicorn. Dain is a nascent novelist, frequent NaNoWriMo participant, occasional Convention attendee, absent-minded blogger, old school shutterbug, and full time dreamer. Born and raised in Arkansas, he was infected with a severe case of Wanderlust as a foal, which has led him to a career in truck driving, as well as many great adventures on the long road home. This article was originally published in the Further Confusion 2014 con book.

It was dark, hot, and the world around me was muted softly. I could feel my breathing and hear my pulse. Blacklights spread over the room made the white fur on my suit’s muzzle glow, casting a fun blue tint across my limited field of vision. Pounding music started to drive me as the dancing started. Spinning around to the soundtrack of my misspent youth I was living a dream years in the making, I had finally fursuited Further Confusion.

I lied to everyone who read my “furries from around the world” articles over a year ago. I concluded by assuring that I would post an article for Australia soon. That was, as GLaDOS would put it, “an outright fabrication”, as I moved back to college for the semester literally three days later and was absolutely confident (at least in the back of my head) that I wouldn’t be writing about furries during the school semester.

Then, suddenly, school ended and I had no excuse. I had a two-hour interview with Carnival and Kraden from ACTFur as well as four completed questionnaires, including one from a Midfur staff member. I had everything I needed. I just didn’t feel like writing. Four months bled into about fifteen months. But, I have the information, and it would be a shame to let it stagnate any more. It’s time to write about Australia.

A few years back , I had the opportunity during a large convention to converse with a fursuiter whose talents and antics I admired greatly. Long ago, you see, before furry was much of an organized fandom I was a suiter myself. As we spoke, just a few feet away two dogs and some sort of feline were playing gently with a little boy and girl, whose eyes were as big as saucers. All was going well until another suiter– who I’ll very carefully fail to describe– walked up, took his head off, and asked one of the dogs when the F he was going to come back to the room. And that, needless, to say, ended that. In a flash the moment was gone and the offended parents were dragging their screaming kids away.

The next two parts of the world both are very close to each other, share enough similarities, and have small enough furry populations that I wasn’t sure whether I should put them both in a single article or separate them. The article would have simply covered “Oceanic countries”: Australia and New Zealand. I added a post script to the introductory emails I sent out, asking whether it would be prudent to cover both countries in a single article or to separate them.

The first response strongly suggested that I don’t write about them both in the same article, noting that Kiwis (the international nickname for New Zealand residents) in particular don’t like being lumped together with the Australians. Another response compared the two to argumentative siblings and said he didn’t think Kiwis would like “being lumped together with their dumb brother”.

The fifth largest country in the world in both size and population takes up nearly half of South America’s land mass. Possibly most notable to foreigners for Carnival (“Carnaval” in Portuguese), encapsulating 60% of the most biodiverse forest in the world, football (“soccer” here in America), and a 130-foot tall statue of Jesus Christ iconic of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is a richly cultured country, so of course it’s bound to have a fascinating furry population.

It was suggested by a few folks that it would be good to do a semi-regular feature on some of the wonderful art that may not follow the norm of what’s posted out there. Today, we’re stepping away from the normal visual art, somewhat, and into the realm of theater, with Sparf’s one-man-show, “What the Fur!? Stories and Text from the Furry Fandom”

This post will differ from the previous art posts in a few ways. Firstly, rather than providing a sample of a few images with links back to the artist’s gallery, the show as posted to YouTube is embedded below. I very much recommend watching through the whole thing, as there is so much wonderful involved here. If you don’t have time now, set aside about half an hour later today to watch through the whole thing. Additionally, we were lucky enough to have the chance to interview Sparf over email in order to get some more information about the work. Check it out!

There is a thick mist surrounding foreign furry fandoms. We Americans are hardly exposed to foreign furry culture beyond the artists we watch on art websites. It’s the reason I wrote an entire article about it. There are shards of content available around the internet. Many foreign artists are on FurAffinity and DeviantArt. Kemonono is an English imageboard that focuses on the Japanese “kemono” art style. However, what we experience is nothing but the art that overseas artists create.

Like many of those who who identify as members of the furry fandom, I joined at a relatively young age. I was reminded of this, recently, when a friend from years ago came out to visit, this last weekend. When he and I were talking most frequently, that was eleven or twelve years ago, which would’ve made me (gulp) fourteen or fifteen. I’ve been dwelling on that point for the last few days, as I worked up the outline of the rest of this article, and things finally fell into place when I consider who I was and where I was in life at that time. I was young, for sure, and just getting into the whole furry thing, watching artists on Yerf and VCL (and Side7 and Elfwood, oh man…) create these awesome drawings, most of which seemed to be spur of the moment things, or works of art created for the sake of creating art. Some, however, were commissions, and that was something I just could not fathom.

An artist – someone I didn’t even know – would draw whatever I told them. For money!

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[adjective][species] is a blog that takes a look at the furry fandom from the inside. The writings here come from a wide variety of furry authors, and cover any and all meta-furry topics that we can get our paws on.